All posts tagged iOS

A host of Apple services were knocked out of service intermittently Tuesday morning, including the new Beats 1 radio station that was exclusively announcing the nominees for the MTV Video Music Award. Read More »

Conventional wisdom says rising smartphone use is a problem for Google, because users spend more time in apps, and less time browsing the Web. A study released Monday by Forrester Research suggests Google may be doing better than thought.

The survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. smartphone users in late 2014 found they spent roughly 12% of their time in Google apps, just shy of the 13% spent in Facebook apps. Read More »

At its Worldwide Developers Conference starting Monday, the company is expected to unveil its push to change how people buy and listen to music. Apple aims to counter the slowdown in music downloads – a business it pioneered more than a decade ago with iTunes – with a new subscription-based streaming service and an ad-supported online-radio offering. Read More »

Apple said the first HomeKit-enabled smart-home devices are coming out next month, refuting a report that said delays with the home automation software platform would push back the launch until August or September. Read More »

Apple’s new larger-screen iPhones are helping the company claw back market share from smartphones running on Google’s Android operating system, according to a new report.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said Apple’s iOS operating system accounted for 47.4% of U.S. smartphone sales in the three months ended November, nearly equal to Android’s 48.4% share during the same period. Apple gained 4.3 percentage points from its share in the same period a year earlier, while Android fell two percentage points.

That marked Android’s first decline in U.S. market share since September 2013 when Apple introduced the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. Read More »

An influential programmer sounded an alarm about the quality of Apple’s software, warning that it had taken a “nosedive” in recent years.

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, a former chief technology officer for Tumblr and typically an Apple supporter, said he’s concerned for Apple’s future because of the rapid decline in the quality of its software. He wrote that his Mac is “riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions.”

“We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ,” Arment wrote on his blog. An Apple spokesman declined to comment. Read More »

Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox Web browser, missed the mobile boom. It wants to avoid a similar fate in virtual reality, which some see emerging as a platform for distributing digital goods, services and entertainment.

Monday, Mozilla unveiled virtual-reality experiences that can be accessed through the Web and viewed using headsets including the Oculus Rift. One streams a documentary, The Polar Sea, shot using 360-degree filming techniques. Another, Sechelt, lets users fly through a 3-D landscape.

Mozilla also is giving away software for developers to create and distribute virtual-reality content. The goal is to ensure that virtual-reality technology remains widely available to developers and consumers through the Web and isn’t controlled by a handful of companies, said Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Andreas Gal. Read More »